We're living longer than ever, but are more scared of ageing - why?

'Britons are living in fear of getting old" declared the news pages of this paper this week. I really shouldn't be one of them. My parents' combined ages at their deaths were 190, and both of them died at home, having enjoyed robust good health until almost the end, and having continued to work into their 90s. I thought all this was normal, but it hasn't stopped me being just as anxious about ageing as, according to last week's poll, three-quarters of the rest of the population.

Something peculiar has happened to us. Though we're living longer than ever before, we're more worried about the fact. People used to feel grateful about ageing (it meant that they'd survived), but today, instead of being an inevitable social process it's become a social problem. And what's scariest of all is the slippage that's taken place: the fear of ageing has turned into a fear of old people. We've gone, in under a century, from gerontophilia (a love of old people) to gerontophobia (a morbid hatred of them). Old women were always more likely to be called hags. But old men? It wasn't long ago that they were the objects of respect.

You're probably still all right if you're an old celebrity, or one of the honorary young - those people who can pass for being a lot younger than they biologically are, like my mother. She only stopped hissing us quiet when we mentioned her age after my sister had persuaded her that people would admire her more for looking so young and not less.

For today ageing seems like some sort of personal crime, a failure of effort and will - why the hell didn't you microdermabrase it away? People compare ageism to sexism and racism but there's a crucial difference: most men aren't ever going to turn into women, or whites into blacks. How strange that we stereotype and stigmatise the very group that (if we're lucky) we're eventually going to join.

In this week's poll, 90% of people said that they knew they wouldn't be able to survive on their pension. Whenever the P-word is mentioned a kind of portcullis comes down in my brain - desperately puerile, I know, but given the headteacherly way that politicians lecture us about pensions, as though we're out each night gambling away those abundantly superfluous funds that Prudence would have saved and invested, who can help but become infantilised?

Like most people my age, I worry that whatever faculties I have will decline. But I also worry about the prejudice, discrimination and poverty I'm likely to encounter over the coming years. How dispiriting that the more "civilised" a society becomes, the worse its attitudes towards old people are, whereas traditional cultures that see death as a natural part of the life cycle see old people in far less ageist terms.

Does it have to be like this? As long as we worship at the altar of Appearance and Consumption, I guess so: your value comes from the market (look how excited people get about the 'grey pound') rather than experience.

Some things have improved. Seeing that fine 1967 film The Graduate again recently, I was struck by how unashamedly hostile it was towards older women. And Anne Bancroft, aka Mrs Robinson, was 35 at the time! (Today Benjamin wouldn't dare abandon her for her daughter: Mrs Robinson would probably be running a hedge fund and Benjamin would be a junior member of her staff.)

Perhaps baby boomers will start to mobilise in collective rage against the dreadful conditions and poverty that their aged parents, and soon, yes, they themselves, are expected to put up with. Oh, I forgot: we don't do collective rage any more, only collective collagen and Botox, and maybe grumpy old women and men.

I'm trying to confront my own fears of ageing by a sort of gestalt switch: every time I see someone who's very old but still mobile, rather than averting my eyes in horror, instead I pray that one day I'll be like them. Wrinkles and all.